John Irving’s first novel begins with two young men, Graff and Siggy, roaming Austria by motorcycle with a plan to break into the Vienna Zoo and set the animals free. 

Setting Free the Bears already carries many of the obsessions that would later define Irving’s work: eccentric friendships, bodily risk, historical shadow, sexual chaos, elaborate digression, death arriving through the side door, and characters whose grand gestures are almost always more complicated than they first appear. It is looser and more feral than his later famous novels, but that is part of the appeal — a debut with its wiring still visible.

For readers interested in early John Irving, odd road novels, postwar European fiction filtered through American literary maximalism, or books where the comic premise is funny but also kind of haunting.

Corgi edition published 1979. Paperback reprint of John Irving’s debut novel, first published in 1968. Cover shows visible shelfwear, creasing, edge rubbing and corner wear; pages are tanned with age but intact. A vintage paperback, not a pristine copy.